Why Spend on ID?
What is instructional design?
Instructional design in a systematic process of developing learning materials. Instructional design relies on learning models and theories to optimize learning. (See what Keving Kruze says here). A learning developer worth his/her salt has knowledge of many of these and will know just what model and theory to use to fit your learning approach.
The value of instructional design is measured by how well the design supports and facilitates the achievement of the instructional objectives, in South Africa, the outcomes. Broderick (2001) says that
Instructional Design is the art and science of creating an instructional environment and materials that will bring the learner from the state of not being able to accomplish certain tasks to the state of being able to accomplish those tasks. Read More
The value of instructional design
Architecture provides a good analogy for the value of instructional design. Like the architecture that supports a building, instructional design is invisible, but there are clear signs of its presence or absence if you know what to look for. What happens when a building is constructed without help from an architect? Stairways lead nowhere. Light switches are hard to find. Doorjambs are too low. Many training courses are constructed similarly, without sufficient planning.
Skills transfer
In the traditional classroom medium, you can work around poorly designed material with good classroom and interpersonal skills. But especially in corporate skills training where skills must be transfered to the workplace, it is essential that when the learner returns to the workplace the learning process continues. For this reason the learning materials need to be good enough to stand in place of the learning facilitator so that they can make this happen, if outcomes are to be reached and lasting learning is to occur.
Effective Learning
With the current emphasis on skills training in South Africa and the developing world today, there is more need than ever for training learners. But not simply for training learners but for providing learners with the opportunity to transfer their skills to the workplace and become exemplary because they have learned how to become life long learners. In the education, training and development field, we all know that Kirkpatrick evaluates whether learning has been effective by asking:
- Do learners like the course?
- Do learners achieve the learning outcomes at the end of the course?
- Do the learners change their behaviours in the workplace?
- Does the course help the company achieve its business goals? (ROI)
(Evaluating Training Programmes, D Kirkpatrick, 1998)
Learning needs to provide measurable changes in all these levels to really be effective.
To get learning to happen on all of these levels you need an expert team. In today's competitive training world it is no longer enough to send employees on all the workshops that training companies have to offer. You need to set yourself apart by retaining your clients and producing learners that assessors can pass, in the workplace, sometimes months after the workshop has ended. For this you need learning materials that can stand in place of the facilitator, alongside the learner, as he/she continues the learning process even after the workshop has ended.
ROI
It is in the transfer of learning and skills by which we measure our return on investment. Ideally, professional learning developer/instructional designer should be involved in your training plans right from the beginning. This can end up saving you time and money in the end because it allows you to design training right from the start that fulfills the needs of all stakeholders, something a learning developer is trained to analyse.
Once-off investment
Investing in the professional development of learning materials is a once off investment. Once you have had a template and flagship materials developed, you are in a position to build out your entire learning materials offering without reinvesting the same amount for revisions and updates.
Advantages of a team approach
Like publishing assisting and other forms of technical writing, instructional design is a way of packaging and managing information for maximum effect. The skill of writing is distinct from other essential training skills such as facilitation or content expertise.
Although facilitator and content experts play a vital role in training and often have many good ideas about what should be in the learning materials, they are not neccesarily trainined to write, package and manage written knowledge. Following a team approach for training, allows each team member to concentrate on what he/she is good at. If well managed, this approach also for constructive criticism between team members, which is important for raising the quality of a learning products.
A professional instructional designer should form part of your professional training team. If the facilitator is also the language editor/translator/instructional designer/content developer they may often get to a stage where they cannot see the wood for the trees and are ineffective at editing, revising their own work. Following a team approach to learning materials development allows fresh and specially trained eyes to evaluate your products as they are developed, ensuring the highest quality development process.
Learning development process
A summarised version of a typical team approach to the learning development process might be described as follows:
- reasearch and development of raw content
- instructional design of raw content into learning materials
- language editing of learning materials
- formative evaluation of learning materials
- graphic design and layout into house style
- proof reading and preparation of final proofs
- print ready learning materials developed